


Primordial

by hwaribo



Category: The Boyz (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Alternate Universe (literally), M/M, Magical Realism, Other Worlds, Princes and Ancient Kingdoms, Temporary Amnesia, Time Travel (kind of), this fic is kind of confusing and i'm sorry in advance i have no way of explaining it actually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-30 18:32:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19408966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hwaribo/pseuds/hwaribo
Summary: Hyunjoon leaps through time, across worlds, and into Juyeon’s arms.





	Primordial

**Author's Note:**

> trigger warnings: mentions/allusions to attempted kidnapping. mentions of how a character couldve gotten electrocuted. mentions of blood, and a character pricking themselves with a needle to produce a droplet of blood.

Deep in the crowds, commotion erupts, but it’s hushed and overpowered by the people, the noise, and the colours celebrating the young prince. It happens in the blink of an eye, in the flash of blue fireworks; a boy is dragged forcibly towards a horse-drawn cart, and he shouts for help, but his voice is drowned out. He begins to twist and kick, and somehow he frees himself from their grip. He runs towards the forest lining the edge of the village, and that’s when they give chase.

As he runs, his clothes, once flowing silken and elegant, catch on the brambles and bushes and begin to shred, leaving strings of fabric and droplets of blood in his wake as the thorns pierce into his skin. Every time he stops to catch his breath, he looks over his shoulder and sees them crashing through the brush. His heart, his lungs, and the soles of his feet burn hot. The forest is spinning and bursting around him.

As he runs, as exhaustion begins to eat away at him and slow him down, he begins to wish for safety. He prays, though he knows it’s in vain, because safety isn’t going to manifest itself in front of him, materialize out of the mulch and foliage beneath his feet. The ground isn’t going to split and swallow him whole, but still he finds himself wishing for a miracle.

Something in his sincerity and desperation on such a bright night allows for an inexplicable impossibility. The ground doesn’t split, no, but when he reaches the forest’s end and collapses against a fortress wall, heaving, a trickle of blood drips from his palm and smears against the stones, and they give way under his weight.

Hyunjoon falls through the wall just as his breathlessness overtakes him and the candle within him flickers out.

A young boy tangled in shredded, bloodied silk, pale and bruised and beautiful, is found unconscious deep in an alleyway at dawn, just as the sunlight breaks over this planet that spins worlds apart from his own.

No one thinks much of it; not the motorcyclist who found him, not anyone in the ambulances or the police cars that were called. But maybe that’s because they don’t know what to think. It’s odd, but it isn’t, not in a world as upside-down and inside-out as this one, and that swift acceptance in itself is a mercy for Hyunjoon.

They stand near his hospital bed, watching him as he sleeps uninterrupted. He has no forms of identification on his person, and his clothes are something regarded as ancient costume here, reserved only for festivals and holidays. His face isn’t one any of the teachers at any of the schools around the city recognize, and there have been no reports of missing boys recently. He was found, but not lost.

When he wakes, he tries to escape his bed and the room before he lets them explain where he is and how they found him. Though still feeling cornered and flighty, he finally tells them his name, but insists he knows nothing more.

Acclimating isn’t easy, especially into a place so foreign. It bears no similarity to anything he knows; the wind changes directions at sunset, the food is piquant and sour, the carts rumble and move without the aid of oxen or horses, and the streets are lined with fallen stars that blind his eyes and dull the ones in the sky.

Kindness remains precious, even in this world. It comes in many forms, in pockets and packages scattered across his days. Sometimes, it comes stark and sudden.

“Watch out, there’s a car coming!” Someone shouts, and Hyunjoon doesn’t even have time to react before hands wrap around his shoulders and push him to the curb. The car speeds past, and Hyunjoon watches it suspiciously, eyes narrowed and arms crossed tightly over his chest. “Please use the sidewalk unless you have a death wish. I’m Jaehyun.”

Hyunjoon has to squint to see him through the lush sunlight of early morning. He’s still sitting on his mint-green bicycle, but he has both legs splayed out and planted firmly in the leaf-littered gutters; he has a smattering of cinnamon freckles across his cheeks and nose, and a childish rasp to his voice. “So they’re called cars? Those things on four wheels?”

Jaehyun makes a noise of realization. _The boy who fell out of the sky last week._ “You.” The sun is swallowed by rolling clouds before Jaehyun talks again. “Stay by my side, alright? At least until you know your way around town.”

Jaehyun walks him to school (“This is my school!” he’d shouted, and Hyunjoon had brightened up, only to sulk when Jaehyun added that he’d graduated last spring), and this continues without fail forever onwards. He waits for him on the street corner, and he always asks just enough questions, never too many and never the uncomfortable ones, never the ones Hyunjoon doesn’t remember the answers to. When it rains, he brings an umbrella wide enough for both of them to disappear under. Some days, he stops at colorful vendors and buys Hyunjoon things to try, and if only for the pleasure on Jaehyun’s face, Hyunjoon finds the food delectable more often than not.

Other times the kindness is a whisper, the fluttering of hummingbird wings, the rustle of flower petals in the wind, gentle and small but just as loud.

Hyunjoon is sitting in an empty pavilion on one of the far corners of the grounds, open onto a mossy, ancient-oak forest. There’s something about the oldness of these trees that he loves, that reminds him of a place on the tip of his tongue and in the burrows of his mind, just out of memory’s reach. Although he’s been finding himself liking this world more and more with every passing day, it’s still too vibrant, too short-circuited, all haphazard and accidental. Everything about it seems built around chance and coincidence and the spur of every moment, no time to breathe, no history, no future, nothing but the present. But here, in this pavilion, the quiet daze seeps into him- his heartbeat slows to the dullest thrum, and his eyelids flutter shut, and he almost falls asleep sitting upright.

He hears footsteps coming closer, so light that he mistakes them for a fox or a cat’s. There’s the sweetness of jasmine on the breeze now, and it’s only when he hears a small gasp that he opens his eyes sharply.

There’s a boy standing at the far end of the pavilion, holding a few books in one hand and a red apple in another, and he seems curious, whereas Hyunjoon is startled by the sight of him here. Hyunjoon does nothing, says nothing, doesn’t move, just gazes at him, and after a while of doing the same, the boy comes closer, and Hyunjoon scowls. The boy breaks the apple and offers Hyunjoon the bigger half.

After he settles into the grass on the far edge, after he takes his bookmark out but before he buries his nose in the pages, he looks at Hyunjoon again, as though wondering if he’d imagined his presence.

“Pinch your arm, rub your eyes, I’ll still be sitting here,” Hyunjoon says without malice when he catches his eye, taking a bite of his half-apple.

The boy’s laughter fills this little corner of their little world. It tickles Hyunjoon like ears of cat grass that brush against anyone walking through a field in late spring. It kisses him warmly, and tells him to open up.

Juyeon doesn’t usually go out of his way to talk to anyone. He’s never the first to break the silence. Hyunjoon is quiet, he’s all whispers and defiant glares, brushing strangers off and burrowing deep into himself. Juyeon is a different kind of quiet; he’s either slow and muddled or a slurred rush, and he’s not one to put himself out there. But there was something that tugged at him when he saw Hyunjoon. His heart, beating madly, a tug from deep within him, from his spirit, from his core, as though he and Hyunjoon had a string binding them together and Hyunjoon was spooling it around his hands, pulling him closer.

Hyunjoon wants- _needs_ \- to be looked after, and Juyeon finds that he likes to watch over him. Jaehyun walks him to school, and Juyeon walks him home, waiting for him by the school gates, head bowed and nose-tip red from the cold, dropping him off on his doorstep.

The streets of this city are lined with buildings and shops like nothing Hyunjoon would ever know, like nothing even his sweetest, maddest dreams could envision. Bathhouses with domed roofs next to sleek glass complexes; flared, meticulously-painted pagodas meant for snowy cliff-edges minutes away from department stores with eye-blinding screen displays. A powder-pink ballet theatre, its corners gilded and painted with cherubs and goddesses, next to a McDonald’s; a bookshop selling nothing but hieroglyphic dictionaries stands across from a temple covered in grape vines, crumbling at its marble pillars. The steam from the fusion vendors carries rich, ticklish blends of spices pulled from every corner of the world. Hyunjoon doesn’t understand any of it, but it dizzies him, and even in his confusion he knows that it’s all a melting pot taken off the heat too soon.

“Your city is strange, Juyeon,” Hyunjoon says one night. There’s a thick fog seeping out of the alleyways and snaking between their legs as they stand on the edge of the sidewalk, in the shadows of a church so old it’s hidden beneath the ivy growing along its walls, waiting for the cars to pass.

“What makes you think so? Is it that different from where you came from?”

Hyunjoon scratches his head. “Well, I don’t remember very much about where I came from, but I do know that your city is strange, and it makes my skin crawl. Something about it isn’t how it’s supposed to be… I can feel it in my blood.”

Juyeon laughs lightly, not thinking much of it, because Hyunjoon’s way of speaking is always so particular and obsolete, and takes Hyunjoon’s hand when the crosswalk light is green.

“You know, you’re supposed to come to school at 7:30 every morning.” Jaehyun had told Juyeon yesterday about how Hyunjoon had, according to his foster parents, refused to get out of bed, and seeing as they weren’t familiar enough with him to put up a fight, they let him sleep through his first three classes.

“Oh.” Hyunjoon has been sitting in the center of the bleachers watching Juyeon dribble a basketball across the court for a while now, holding Juyeon’s jacket in his hands and cheering whenever his ball sails through the jingling metal net (which is often). The orange sun is sinking into a haze of clouds, and the crisp northern wind is picking up and ghosting over them. “I thought you could come whenever you wanted. I liked it more that way.”

Juyeon smiles in spite of himself. He knows this is where he’s supposed to berate Hyunjoon and instill the rules of this world in his mind, so he can acclimate and catch up faster, but a part of him is so endeared by his innocent refusal to adhere. Sometimes, he wonders if Hyunjoon’s joking, or if he really doesn’t know, but the look in his eyes right now is so defiant and intense that it prevents him from asking.

Then again, considering his sudden appearance in their city last month, a stranger to this place (as they all were to him), a face they had never seen before, with nothing to attribute to him besides a name and some tattered clothes, and considering Juyeon’s love for bedtime stories, folklore, and fairytales, he’d much rather believe that Hyunjoon is a gift from another world.

Juyeon offers to teach Hyunjoon the rules of the game, tossing the ball towards him. “It seems boring to sit on the sidelines and watch.”

Hyunjoon catches it, spins it in his hands, and throws it back, shaking his head. “I like watching _you_ play, that’s all.”

The thing about Hyunjoon is that he’s confused by the simplest things in this world. He’s childlike, the way he grows so tired after a long day of learning new things; most nights, when they’re sitting at the bus stop, he leans his head on Juyeon’s shoulder and falls asleep, mouth slightly open. Juyeon often finds him with a stalk of sour-grass caught between his teeth, crouched down to feed a stray cat the cheese slices he picked out of his lunch sandwich. He doesn’t know how to tie a tie, he’d rather use his fingers than a fork, he first thought televisions were windows, and on most mornings, his cardigan is buttoned wrong and he has crumbs of bread stuck to the corner of his lip. But then there are words he utters, and there’s the way he carries himself so splendidly and nobly, and something in the depth of his eyes is that of a thousand-year-old statue that has stood through the erosion of time.

He freezes up whenever a car comes down the road, no matter what Juyeon says to convince him that they’re harmless so long as he keeps to the sidewalk, so now he makes a point of walking on the outer side and holding Hyunjoon’s hand whenever they pass.

“What happened to the horses?” Hyunjoon had whispered one evening, his solemn face looking as though something sickly and sad had dawned in his mind.

It takes Juyeon a while to understand. In Juyeon’s mind, the thought of Hyunjoon being from an ancient world has now begun to bloom. He’s beginning to wonder, and to believe in the lore of his old storybooks, about magicians who twisted time and traveled between worlds. “Oh, they still exist. Cars are just more efficient these days.”

“Louder and smellier, too,” Hyunjoon mumbles.

Shreds of what preceded his arrival here begin to manifest in his mind, as time goes on. Juyeon took him to the stables on the outermost edges of the city, and Hyunjoon had mounted a horse and galloped away with no hesitation and better form than the stable-keeper himself. Juyeon takes him to the pavilion near the forest, and when they sit surrounded by nothing but the sound of birds, crickets, and wind through rosebushes, he begins to remember his old life and self.

“Everything has a blur, a slash through its middle, but when I’m here, and when I’m around you, it’s all on the tip of my tongue,” Hyunjoon tells him, closed eyelids fluttering as he speaks.

“Is there anything I can do to help you remember?” Juyeon feels like he’s grasping at sand and trying to keep it from sifting through his fingers. He wants to do something; he barely knows Hyunjoon, yet he feels like he’d turn the world on its head if it meant something to him, if it fixed something for him. There’s a draw, a pull from deep in his heart, a pain that spreads through him when he sees Hyunjoon looking so lost, a daisy among thorns, the moon among stars, a misfit in a crowd of people who can do nothing but watch. Juyeon wants to do more than that.

“Your presence is enough.” Hyunjoon’s face scrunches up, clenched in an attempt at recollection. “Faces with no names I can remember are smiling at me. The high-pitched fizz of fireworks. Tall grey walls surrounding a familiar place, somewhere lush and teeming with red-breasts, ladybugs, and rosebushes. That must be why I’m so fond of the quiet of these woods. I can feel a heaviness placed on the top of my head by small servants’ hands. I can smell soups and festive desserts, but I can’t remember how they taste, and I recognize the voices I’m beginning to hear, echoing, faraway down a hallway, but I can’t remember whose they are.”

This is the most Juyeon has heard him say at once. His voice is wavering, warbling, wafting in and out of a trembling trance. But then he opens his eyes and shakes his head, his smile so regal and sad, so splendidly heartsick and broken.

“Hyunjoon, hear me out. I’m not denying that what you’re saying is the truth, but what if. What if something bad happened to you, and they found you in that alleyway, and that was all a bad dream you had when you-”

“Don’t you think I’d have had a family waiting at the foot of my hospital bed, if that were the case? Don’t you think I’d have a birth certificate somewhere, or at least my name in your city’s records?” Hyunjoon sounds cold now, drenched and entrenched in a thick, centurial loneliness that no one, not even Juyeon, can reach through. Of course he would doubt him. What proof does he have of his past, of his otherworldliness, considering his memory is so muddled and empty? After all, even his confusion and his insistence could be linked to hallucination as a result of the critical condition he was found in. “No, Juyeon, if it was all a bad dream, then it would mean I haven’t woken up yet.”

His words sting, like swallowing saltwater does. His loneliness aches, how badly he misses something he can’t even find the words to explain, homesick for a place and people that have long since faded from memory and history, and when it bleeds into Juyeon, it feels like he’s breathing in smoke.

Hyunjoon feels like a ripple in an ocean of time, a pinprick in the millennium. He feels like his tongue has been tied, his wrists bound, his eyes blindfolded, his ears covered. Thrust off a cliff edge he couldn’t see, his lamp snuffed out before he was pushed into the shadows, wings cut off yet told to fly.

Juyeon stretches his hand out, palm up for Hyunjoon’s taking. “I didn’t think my words through before I said them. I really do believe you, I hope you know that.”

Hyunjoon puts his hand in his.

“Textbooks make for pretty uncomfortable pillows, believe me, I have firsthand experience. Get up and finish your math problems.”

Hyunjoon lets the wind of the outdoor courtyard blow the pages of the book over his face, sighing.

Jaehyun has spent the last hour sitting across from him on this sun-bleached picnic table, sifting through his schoolwork and trying to help him with all the things he doesn’t understand. He laughs. “You’re becoming more and more like the average sixteen-year-old, the more time you spend here.”

Hyunjoon’s response is muffled. “Speaking of that; why do I have to live by your world’s rules?”

“Because we’re trying to help you acclimate. We don’t even know where you came from, let alone whether you’ll ever be going back,” Jaehyun responds, tapping Hyunjoon’s temples lightly with his fingertips. “Might as well get some trigonometry and Pre-Raphaelites in there.”

The sound of the pine needles rustling in the wind gives Juyeon an upper hand, so when he appears from somewhere behind Hyunjoon and slides into the bench beside him, it takes him by surprise. He looks through the papers quickly. “Still having trouble with these?” He folds his arms on the tabletop and puts his head in them, mirroring Hyunjoon, lip-tails upturned. “I can try to talk to the deans, if you want. They might be able to write you off, or at least lighten your assignments.”

“Why are you like this to him?” Jaehyun interrupts sourly.

“You’re just bitter you had to do all this studying way back in _your_ day, so now you’re trying to force it on me,” Hyunjoon retaliates.

“There you have it, Hyunjoon: if _he_ graduated, then so can you, piece of cake,” Juyeon reassures, talking like Jaehyun isn’t sitting across from them both. Only they can get away with this, because Juyeon has known Jaehyun for as long as he can remember, and Jaehyun’s had a large space carved out in his heart for Hyunjoon ever since he laid eyes on him, so anything they do goes.

Jaehyun narrows his eyes and looks between them. He stays quiet, but this is the moment where he catches up to them, connects the dots, puts one and the other together in his head.

The night market is alive. The air is thick with both steam and smoke, wafting from creaking chimneys and rickety stalls, and there isn’t a fixed source of light; it’s woven all around them, coming from oil lamps and lopsided hanging candles and fluorescent signs alike. Hands, belonging to merchants, cooks, and crooks alike, stretch out holding fistfuls of faux-bijoux, or ladles full of strange stews that slosh and spill all over the pavement, or crumpled old papers of prophetic poetry, and Jaehyun teaches Hyunjoon to push them away- unless he sees something that interests him.

Jaehyun leads him through the throngs, looking back at Hyunjoon and squeezing his hand reassuringly every once in a while. Eventually, they burst through the noise and the clamor, and it all disperses as they seep into the dimmer corners of the market. Jaehyun leads him to a hole-in-the-wall with a counter that stretches into the street, and pulls high chairs out for both of them.

The food is odd. Round, eaten with the hands and not with utensils, and topped with something melted that stretches into strings when Hyunjoon tries to pull away from it. Jaehyun has a time laughing at him and trying to help him wipe his lip-corners and chin. Hyunjoon picks off the excess and feeds it to the stray cats milling about, weaving between the legs of their chairs. He coughs and recoils, his nose and throat burning, when he takes a tentative sip of the bubbling drink Jaehyun convinced him to try.

“Why do you keep laughing at me?”

Jaehyun’s lips can’t stop twitching, and his cheeks are splotched with colour. “It’s just, between this and the time I took you out for spaghetti and meatballs and you asked me if the butterknife was yours to keep, and if I could ask the waiter to bring you the sheath…” He sees Hyunjoon bristling in embarrassment, and rushes to make his point clear. “It’s just… It’s cute, Hyunjoon. You’re very different from anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Maybe your world is ridiculous, and I’m the only normal one,” he retaliates, taking a very particular, practiced bite of his pizza.

“It’s ridiculous, but it can be beautiful sometimes. Look up.”

He’s right. Clustered above them, hanging on strings stretching loosely from one end of the alley to the other, are bobbing, glowing orange lanterns, soft tissue paper wrapped around flickering lamps. Against the sliver of night sky they’re sitting beneath, barely visible between the rooftops, they look like planets and stars that have fallen too close, time stopping before they could collide into the earth. Words Hyunjoon recognizes are painted in red across the length of the lanterns, and the dizzying weight this language carries with it makes his blood boil and his heart race.

“Jaehyun, what’s written on the lanterns?” He asks, out of breath.

“Chinese, I think. I’m supposed to be able to read it, they taught us in middle school, but I don’t understand a single thing-”

“That’s okay. I think I can.” Jaehyun tilts his head and gazes at him curiously, and Hyunjoon grips the edge of the counter when unprecedented memories begin pouring in, blinding his eyes with their harsh vividness. It’s not that the words have any significance; they’re leftovers from the New Year’s celebrations that happened before Hyunjoon arrived here, but it’s the language that unlocked something deep within him. It has something to do with where he came from.

Jaehyun asks him if he wants to go home, and Hyunjoon shakes his head, gulping and smiling weakly. Jaehyun is putting it together, slowly but surely, but he doesn’t prod him further.

Hyunjoon manages to suppress the memories, swallowing them down for the rest of the night. When they do eventually make their way to Hyunjoon’s doorstep, Jaehyun gasps and slaps the top of his head just as he turns to leave. It’s so animated and bizarre that it momentarily takes Hyunjoon away from the spinning in his head.

Jaehyun pulls a rolled paper wrapped in ribbon out of his back-pocket and hands it to him. “It’s a bit crumpled by now, because I’ve been sitting on it for three hours, but it’s an invitation. To my birthday party.” He beams at him, and for the third time, bids him a good night before disappearing into the darkness at the end of the gravel driveway.

The letter is the feather that flutters down and tips the scales. It reminds Hyunjoon of a kingdom, of peasants and scholars and warriors and princesses. Of a coronation, the heavy scent of fresh-cut garden flowers, the heavy drape of gilded clothes flowing from his shoulders, and the heavy weight of a crown on his head. It reminds him of fireworks, of him escaping the carriage, playful and sprightly and foolish, of his guards losing him in the crowds. It was all fun and games until he ended up with a filthy hand over his eyes and a gag tight across his lips.

Juyeon’s house is as comfortable to be in as it is to be around him. It’s breezy, quiet, and easy to lose yourself in, full of niches, corners, and items that are vying for Hyunjoon’s curiosity. Bookshelves built into the walls and up and down the staircase, teeming with anything from colorful, laminated magazines to thick, musty research journals. All the curtains are drawn wide open so that lush late afternoon sunlight pours through, warming the glass panes and the rugs beneath their feet. Potted plants taller than Hyunjoon with huge leaves that flutter and make standing between four walls feel more like being in the meadows of a mountain-forest, the sound of wind through trees and the minty smell of foliage and greenery.

Juyeon sees Hyunjoon’s fingers hover over the spine of an old chemistry textbook. “Pull down anything that catches your attention. I’ve read them all, they could use a fresh pair of eyes to look over them.”

Hyunjoon giggles and pulls the book out, tucking it under his elbow for safekeeping until he can curl up with it later. “I like your house. A lot. It grants me peace of mind.”

Now it’s Juyeon’s turn to laugh, at Hyunjoon’s turns of phrase; he talks like his great-grandfather used to. “Well, my mom already _loves_ you, and she’s barely even gotten two words out of you, and the key’s always in the backdoor, so.”

When Hyunjoon’s had his fill of reading the titles of the books aloud and leaning into the plants to breathe them in, he follows Juyeon upstairs to his bedroom. He refuses to sit on his bed, even though Juyeon insists it’s fine, and so he gravitates to the desk by the window, then has Juyeon spend the better part of twenty minutes trying to explain the concept of a computer.

Sometimes, Juyeon gets the distinct, ticklish, ear-warming feeling that Hyunjoon is pulling his leg- that he’s only asking him about things to make him talk so much. He asked him what the computer was, but he doesn’t ask him what words like “interface” and “website” mean, and it’s impossible that he knows one but not the other. He certainly seems like he’s listening, but to his voice as opposed to his words, blinking slowly, basking in it like it’s another form of sunlight.

Eventually, Hyunjoon settles, chin in palm and eyes fixed on Juyeon, cat to a ball of yarn. Juyeon sits next to him, out of words to use. The silence fills the room. When Hyunjoon speaks again, Juyeon’s feelings are reaffirmed. Hyunjoon is forward; he hides his feelings behind a blank face around strangers, but here, in the comfort of an upstairs bedroom, he wears them on his sleeve. “I want to know more about you, Juyeon. Tell me more.”

Juyeon laughs. “There are much less boring people out there who have much brighter lives to tell you all about.”

“But I’m only interested in you.” Hyunjoon nudges Juyeon’s calf with the tips of his toes. “Don’t you understand?” He rolls his eyes and sighs without malice, as though Juyeon is being purposefully oblivious. In truth, Juyeon hardly understands, but he’s beginning to. Hyunjoon wants to learn about this world through his eyes, he wants to walk down the streets with Juyeon’s arm around his shoulder, he wants to fall asleep to the sound of Juyeon’s voice recounting stories of a childhood that has long since passed. In those moments, he feels right at home, like he has no past to unearth and nowhere to return to, just a future here, unfurling before him.

Juyeon is more than willing to tell him everything he wants to hear. Juyeon wants to do and say so much, but he always waits for Hyunjoon to lead him by hand, to tell him what it is he wants to hear.

So Juyeon begins describing his favourite things. Raspberries, fog, going camping in the mountains beyond the city limits.

“I’d like to go there sometime,” Hyunjoon interrupts.

“You can’t access it except by car, it’s a long road-trip.”

“Well, maybe when you have your… what’s it called? That’s right, your driver’s license. Maybe then you can take us both.”

“You’re terrified of cars, but you’d trust me behind the wheel?”

Hyunjoon nods, and Juyeon is momentarily overwhelmed. But he continues listing his favourite things; poems and stories that take his imagination to another world, even if his body’s still anchored to the bench in the park down the street. Nubby sweaters just a few sizes too large. Then he strays into a tangent about the autumn breeze when it blows through high branches, and he begins to talk about memories of climbing the trees in his grandmother’s orchard. Hyunjoon closes his eyes, and puts his head in his hands, and falls asleep.

Juyeon puts a blanket over Hyunjoon’s folded figure, tucking it in beneath his chin. He opens the half-read book on his nightstand and loses himself in it. Hyunjoon’s body is still, but within his mind, a storm of a thousand years rumbles, and he’s taken into a daydream in a faraway place.

The apple Juyeon split and gave him in the pavilion when they’d first met. How remarkably whole it had been, its flesh pale, firm, moist. The image of another apple, as red and round on the surface as Juyeon’s had been, cracked open to reveal a core writhing with maggots, flashes in his mind’s eye. They don’t fall far from the tree.

It’s fuzzy around the edges. He makes a noise in his sleep, and Juyeon peers over his book at him. _Just a bad dream_ , he decides.

Hyunjoon is young again; his hands can hardly hold the books he’s being made to flip through, and his hat keeps slipping down his head and hanging by the ribbon tied under his chin. A scholar is sitting across from him, holding a polished red apple in one hand. He tells him that the apple is superficially perfect, and that that’s what matters most; Hyunjoon repeats after him and nods.

Now Hyunjoon’s sitting alone deep in an overgrown garden, hiding behind the hedges, nestled between the green thorns and the rose-buds. He’s holding the apple in both hands. He has a paring knife, sheathed, stolen from the kitchens when the cooks weren’t looking, waiting at his feet.

A startled gasp. The apple, halved, the knife, and the sheath, a few feet apart under the wind-rustled hedges. He watches the worms squirm through its soft, oozing middle. An age-old lesson; that things may be different behind closed doors, that not everything is as meets the eye, that facades conceal the flaws beneath the surface.

Hyunjoon has never been one to take what he’s told without questioning it. Skepticism, perhaps, or maybe stubbornness. Instinct and intuition, sometimes. His dream loops over, the memory of his old life beginning to fade and blur, and when he opens his eyes, he’s back in a world as small as that apple had been; and as unsettling and morbid, deep down, when stripped of all its colours and confetti.

All things splendid this world has to offer collect under Jaehyun’s roof tonight, like droplets of rain running down a branch and pooling into a leaf. Everything is warm; the strings of light hanging from doorway to doorway, the water of the pool that glows in the dark when Hyunjoon dips his fingers into it, the balmy wind that gusts through whenever the air grows too still, sending ripples across the pool. The fizzing candles sticking out of the blue icing of his birthday cake, casting heat on his cheeks when Jaehyun pulls him in close before he blows them out. The smile the boy standing across from him has, the way it lights up his entire face.

“You’re someone I’ve never seen before.”

“I’m not really from here,” Hyunjoon agrees.

“Out of town? Next city over?”

“Outer space would be a closer guess,” Hyunjoon answers. The boy laughs hard, taking it as a joke, and a great one at that.

He says his name is Haknyeon, and then, in the same breath, “Try the cherries jubilee, or the crepes suzette.” When he thrusts a bowl of ice cream into Hyunjoon’s hands, wraps his fingers around the spoon, and urges him to eat it before it melts, it’s not overbearing, somehow. “You looked like you had a sweet tooth, boy-from-outer-space.”

He takes the hint. “Hyunjoon.”

“You don’t talk much, Hyunjoon, but I like you more than I should, considering we met five minutes ago at my cousin’s birthday party.” Cousins. The overwhelming warmth runs in the blood, and now that Hyunjoon thinks about it, his and Jaehyun’s smiles make him feel the same way; splendidly sun-soaked.

“So I’ll be seeing more of you if I stay by Jaehyun’s side?”

Haknyeon winks. “You bet you will.”

Jaehyun is at the front door, watching his guests leave and making sure they don’t forget any of their valuables at his house, and Juyeon is tidying in their wake. Hyunjoon hangs back, overwhelmed by the gentle chaos of the night. He walks around the edge of the pool, a thousand foreign names on his mind, and a thousand foreign flavours on his tongue.

The wires of the light system are tangled. Hyunjoon doesn’t think twice before he reaches down and coils the cords around his hands, dragging them across the abandoned garden. No one’s here to stop him, to warn him, to notice what he’s doing.

He thinks nothing of it, because he doesn’t know better; the wires now drag along the tiles where the water of the pool laps and overflows.

Splotches of yellow and white, then a blur of hands. Juyeon’s voice, tinny in his ear. His body sprawled on the ground, cushioned and cradled against Juyeon’s arms. _What were you thinking? How could you not_ _know? Hyunjoon, can you even hear me?_ At this, he opens his eyes.

He doesn’t know what he did wrong, but it’s written all over Juyeon’s face. Fear that hardens into anger. “You could have…” _died._

His throat tightens and closes up. Seeing Juyeon like this, not knowing what he did wrong, not understanding the fear, or the anger, or anything in the situation at all, is causing him to crumble from the inside out.

“Why are you two on the ground?” Jaehyun stands between the sliding glass doors, rubbing his eyes sleepily, a half-unwrapped gift tucked under one arm.

“Tripped over the wires.” It’s a fraction of the truth. Jaehyun raises his eyebrows, making sure they know he finds the excuse cheap. After a weighted pause, in which he helps them both to their feet and Juyeon takes his green school jacket off- it’s a weeknight, and basketball practice had stretched into the early hours of the evening- to wrap it over Hyunjoon’s shoulders, he says, “I’ll walk Hyunjoon home tonight.” There’s no room to argue, and Jaehyun’s too far gone to scrutinize either of them.

The jacket keeps slipping off Hyunjoon’s shoulders, and his arms are swallowed away when he sinks his hands deep into its pockets. The nubby, over-washed fabric and its smell (oatmeal bar-soap and apples) are comforting to have so close. It smells like Juyeon, like his duvet and his pillows, and if Hyunjoon closes his eyes, he can trick himself into thinking it feels like an embrace. He’s holding onto it as a symbol, a signifier that Juyeon doesn’t hate him, doesn’t fear him, doesn’t resent him for whatever it is that he did wrong earlier. The street-lights are too bright to see stars or faces through, and Juyeon walks on the outer side, and flinches whenever Hyunjoon does when a car passes by.

“Water is a conductor of electricity, Hyunjoon.” The stiffness in his voice is fragmented. “When those wires dipped in the pool… it would’ve killed you, _very_ easily. What would I have done then? What if I hadn’t been trying to find you?”

Oh. The wind-whipped, breathless fear wasn’t _of_ him, the wild-eyed lividness wasn’t _from_ him, it was _for_ him, for his life hanging on the line. Knowing this doesn’t make him feel any less sickly and flighty, though. The simplicity of his mistake, so simple that someone like Juyeon can hardly even accept it, leaves him homesick for a place where he knows what’s commonplace, what’s right from wrong, safeties from dangers. It does nothing but make him feel more isolated in this place. He’s a drop in the bucket, yet he’s a fish out of water. A lonely little island battered by violent waves from all sides.

He shudders and pulls Juyeon’s jacket tighter around him, bunching it around his collar. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to apologize about. You didn’t know any better,” Juyeon says. It’s just two vulnerable voices in the dark, echoing back and forth; both terrified, both confused, both trying to understand each other’s worlds and how they’ve collided. “I feel useless. And responsible. How did it slip my mind to warn you about this? What if it happens again in the future?”

“It happened for a reason. Everything does, whether you believe in fate or not.”

A silence that seems everlasting falls.

It’s so soft, so tentative. It’s almost a thought that lost its way and was whispered out on accident. It’s full of fear, but for all the fear there’s plenty of wonder, too. “Where are you from? Where did you come from? How did you end up here?”

Hyunjoon wants to say he doesn’t remember, but that would be a fraction of the truth. Not when it’s all coming back to him, every time he closes his eyes, every time Juyeon asks him how and why.

It’s raining cats and dogs. The water runs down the street and gushes through the gutters clogged with autumn leaves. The wind makes the weathervane on the roof creak and spin. The sky is so dark that they need the lights on in the afternoon, and Hyunjoon finds himself gravitating towards the warmth originating from the corner between the desk and beneath the window (“It’s called a radiator,” Juyeon had said when he’d walked in to find Hyunjoon sprawled lazily before it. “Magic, isn’t it?”).

Hyunjoon stretches and yawns, closing the dictionary he’d been poring through. He migrates from the artificial source of warmth to Juyeon’s side, basking in the heat of his skin and touch. Lately, Hyunjoon has taken to hooking his chin on the edge of Juyeon’s shoulder and following whatever book he’s reading with him, even if it’s an unprecedented chapter that Hyunjoon doesn’t understand. What he does is ask what different words he doesn’t recognize mean, and marvel at the lengths Juyeon will go, putting the book down and over-explaining animatedly, to try to get the definitions across. He knows it’s unkind, and he’s selling himself short (that is, if Juyeon doesn’t see right through him and choose to play along anyway) by doing so, but sometimes he pretends not to understand, because he loves to lose himself in the contortions of Juyeon’s face and the colours of his voice.

“What’s a doughnut?”

“You’d like it. Soft and glazed with sugar.”

“What’s a cigarette?”

“Remember those clouds of smoke that made you cough your lungs out when we walked past those old women at the park last week?”

Hyunjoon’s whiskers twitch- he wrinkles his nose. Juyeon looks over his shoulder at him and smiles, but it falters when he realizes how close their faces are. His nose-tip brushes against Hyunjoon’s, who shows no signs of backing down or away. Juyeon looks away quickly.

“What’s a radio?”

“A little machine with lots of buttons that plays music or recorded voices loudly.”

The rain pounds the roof. “When you find a good stopping point in your book, I have another question I’d like to ask.”

Juyeon tucks his bookmark into the page and sets the book down on the bed, looking over his shoulder at Hyunjoon.

“What’s a kiss?” He’s deceptive, Juyeon too innocent. Will he really succumb to this one?

Hyunjoon watches the notch in Juyeon’s throat, the way it tightens when he swallows quietly. Juyeon is a beetle on its back right now, cornered and unable to run away. “A kiss is when you press your lips to someone else’s skin, as a display of affection or love. Family or friends may kiss each other’s hands, cheeks, or foreheads, but a lover… a lover will kiss you on the lips.”

Juyeon blinks, trying not to look at Hyunjoon’s lips, and failing miserably; Hyunjoon feels so much closer than he was when he asked the question. His hand hovers over Juyeon’s forearm. He leans in and kisses Juyeon’s cheek, delicate as a tuft of dandelion, and as short-lived, too, blown away in the breeze, even though the room is still and the windows sealed shut.

Hyunjoon waits. “Well, go on,” Juyeon whispers, urging him onwards, eyes closed, lips beginning to curl up.

Now his forehead, sitting up on his knees to turn his head and part his hair. This one is papery and ticklish- Juyeon begins to laugh softly under his lips and their spell.

Juyeon opens his eyes just in time to see Hyunjoon’s cheeks glowing red as October apples. He reaches out, caressing his warm cheek with his thumb. His hand sinks down and finds a place, a sweet little spot at the nape of Hyunjoon’s neck. His fingers curl into Hyunjoon’s ruffled hair, and Hyunjoon’s eyes flutter, half-lidded, tilting his chin up expectantly.

Juyeon’s lips taste like rolling mist feels at the end of a hot summer day. Hyunjoon’s lips taste like they’re stained with raspberries fresh off the bush. It feels good, the way their lips fit together. It feels good to know that this will be something they can do from now onwards. That Juyeon can kiss Hyunjoon’s nose when they’re alone in their pavilion in the woods, that Hyunjoon can bury his face in Juyeon’s sweaters and find a haven there, with his ear pressed to his steady, everlasting heartbeat.

“Your ears are very red,” Hyunjoon observes smugly. Juyeon tries to cover them with his hands, but Hyunjoon pulls them back down before he can. “I like it. It means you liked it. It means I made you shy.”

A sweet, blood-orange sunset can be seen in slivers from the window and the balcony, and it’s begging to be remembered. And when the eyes of its beholders can bear to be torn away from each other, they soak it up.

“By the way, I knew what a kiss was, stupid,” Hyunjoon adds quietly. “I can’t _believe_ you fell for that!”

Clouds gather in the distance. For now, Hyunjoon focuses on the silver lining instead of the way they obscure the sun.

Movie tickets for two sticking out of the top corner of Hyunjoon’s chemistry textbook; a gift for him to find when he finishes studying for his exams. They’re in black and white, and they’re dramatic, the main characters’ romances a whirlwind almost exhausting to keep up with. Juyeon feeds Hyunjoon caramel corn, and Hyunjoon rests his head against his shoulder so Juyeon can whisper trivia and commentary into his ear. On their walk home, they attempt the ballroom dances they just watched, twirling under the streetlights and the dying autumn trees, and even when they stop, Juyeon’s arm stays wrapped around Hyunjoon’s waist, his fingers tickling his side. This happens a few streets from Hyunjoon’s house, and both of them are quiet so as not to call attention to the way they’re entwined, but Hyunjoon wishes it had lasted longer.

Juyeon’s been holding Hyunjoon’s hand whenever they cross a street since they first met, but since their first kiss, it’s felt different. His touch is no longer electrically-charged and stiff, and he always seems hesitant when it’s time to break away. No, it’s delightful now, the world in slow motion when Juyeon’s fingers curl between his. He always comments on how cold Hyunjoon’s hands are, and always ends up trying to squeeze and rub his own bubbling warmth into them.

Hyunjoon knows his way around the city alone now. He becomes a magpie, Juyeon’s room his nest, collecting objects that catch his eye, things that sparkle and shine and remind him of Juyeon. Books of poetry with violets and daisies pressed and dried into their pages, a strange little stopwatch that spins counter-clockwise, another stuffed animal to add to the ever-growing pile at the foot of his bed. Every time, Hyunjoon hides it behind his back, and puts up the smallest of fights when Juyeon tries to reach around for it, and every time, Juyeon kisses the tip of his nose, or his collarbones, or his neck (which tickles and makes him gasp).

The nightmares are darker and longer when he sleeps over at Juyeon’s house. Sweat beads his forehead, and he whines under his breath, bunching up the sheets in his fists. Juyeon is so disturbed when he hears him fighting against someone’s restraints in his sleep that he shakes him awake and hugs him until his breathing winds down.

“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Juyeon shushes him, reaching over to strike a match and light the oil lamp on his nightstand. They’re bathed in flickers of warmth, their shadows long and gaunt. “I’m a light sleeper, anyway.”

“You and I both know that’s a lie,” Hyunjoon says.

“What are the dreams about?”

“They were scattered and painful, when I first arrived here. But they’re slowly starting to make more sense.” Hyunjoon hugs one of the goose-down pillows, and Juyeon sits cross-legged, eyebrows furrowed, a hand on Hyunjoon’s knee. “Sometimes, it’s memories, of nameless people whose faces bring a smile to my face. Sometimes it’s places I feel like I’ve been to a thousand times before.” A thousand lives ago.

In the dead silence of the night, Hyunjoon takes Juyeon’s face in his hands and pulls him closer. He kisses him tiredly, sweetly, endlessly, relishing in their softness, and the comfort spreading through him. Juyeon’s hands are all over him; in his hair, cupping his jaw, caressing his neck.

“I feel homesick for a place your world calls ancient and obsolete,” he says when they part. It’s like sand running through the cracks between his fingers, like water dripping out of a tap no matter how tightly it’s been shut. The marching of time goes forward, but his heart keeps going back, back, _back,_ too far back.

Juyeon kisses the edge of his lips, quick and stolen. “Do you want to go back?”

Hyunjoon hesitates before he nods. “I dream of cities that don’t exist anymore,” he whispers, playing with Juyeon’s hair, pressing lips to his jaw. “But you know, the strange thing about all these dreams? You’re in every one, no matter the place.”

The apple with the rotten core had been so polished and red. This world at its surface has so much to offer, so many things that shine and are served on a silver platter, teeming with so many sights and sounds and flavours anywhere Hyunjoon turns. It may not be rotten, but there’s something haunting behind the lights and the smiles. Everything and nothing exist at once here, like the people and the city sprung up and sprawled out of nowhere, an afterthought after Hyunjoon arrived but before he’d opened his eyes. It doesn’t feel real, no matter how hard he blinks, no matter how many days and nights he spends here.

Juyeon seems real, and so does Jaehyun. But the people in the background, the people milling about, filling up the empty spaces in the periphery? They seem as lost as he does, caught in a station between worlds. This city is sandwiched between the ancient world that Hyunjoon knows and the modern world that bewilders and terrifies him, its foundation so beyond his lifetime that he can’t begin to understand it. Sometimes, however, he recognizes elements of where he comes from, in things like the floating orange lanterns above the night market and the crumbling fortress walls caught between the tree trunks of an old forest.

The drawer of Hyunjoon’s nightstand is open and empty. In his hands, on his bed, clothing made of silken fabric. Juyeon unfolds them slowly, letting the excess fall to the floor of Hyunjoon’s room. It’s embroidered with flowers, soft and full-sleeved and tied with ribbons. Upon closer look, it’s torn and tattered, slashes shredding through the silk. Old stains, deepened from a fresh red to a plum-brown over time, bleed through the embroidery. “They found you in these?”

Hyunjoon nods.

“I’ve seen clothes like these, but only ever preserved in museums behind glass displays, or custom-made replicas in the old parts of town,” he says, thinking out loud, talking to himself mostly. “These… Hyunjoon, these are centuries old. You’re sixteen, right? It’s impossible.”

“I shouldn’t be alive, not here, at least. I should be the dust and bones in the earth beneath your feet. If I hadn’t fallen away from my world that day, and ended up in yours, we would never have known anything about each other.”

“Fallen away?”

“I was captured at royal festivities, and I escaped, and they chased me to the end of the forests,” as Hyunjoon speaks, the picture he paints with his words grows clearer, the words coming to his tongue and spilling out of him at the same time as the memories return to him. His dark eyes flicker. “It seems like a tall tale, doesn’t it?”

“No, I believe you,” Juyeon breathes. “But why were you kidnapped? Where…?”

Hyunjoon unearths the sheer black headpiece he’d tucked away between the puffy blue sleeves. He props it on his knee and smooths the bends and curves, then reluctantly, hesitantly, grimacing as he does, lifts it and places it over his head. It sits austere and elegant.

Juyeon fills in the blanks. “It was _your_ coronation.”

He nods. “I wandered off when no one was looking, I didn't know… all I knew was I didn’t want to be locked into such a life, it seemed so cruel and sickening. The red throne was too high for me to sit in.”

_So why do you still want to go back?_ Juyeon thinks, but doesn’t say. He reaches out to caress his cheek, but his hand stops in mid-air. He’s at a loss, and a part of him is terrified that Hyunjoon will disappear away as quickly as he came.

Hyunjoon takes it in both of his. “Remember what I told you when we first met? “Pinch your arm, rub your eyes, I’ll still be sitting here”? Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.”

“But our lifetimes aligned when they never should have,” Juyeon whispers.

“You and your world, your lifetime and this city… I don’t think they should exist either. I think we’re both walking a fine line, Juyeon; I’m from thousands of years ago, yet I’m preserved and alive, in this room right now. Your world is a mish-mash of a thousand years ago and a thousand years ahead, and I think it wouldn’t exist had I not called upon it in desperation, had the doors between worlds not opened and crashed together.”

Juyeon shakes his head. His voice is warbled and thin. “I don’t think so. This world is all I know, it can’t just be a figment of your desperation. It’s impossible.” He sounds like he’s trying to convince himself just as much as Hyunjoon. “Not when I have concrete memories of a childhood and a life predating your arrival.”

“Well, what’s beyond this city, Juyeon?”

“Hills, valleys, mountains. We’ve talked about going camping sometime! And there’s my grandma’s house, hours away! And then there’s the ocean, and then there are countries across that.”

Hyunjoon’s jaw is set, and he shakes his head. “Take me to see them, Juyeon. In your car.”

“What’s gotten into you?” Juyeon squeezes his hand, gently, as though trying to wake him from his stubborn denial. “Why won’t you believe my words anymore?”

“I think your mind is clouded; I think that’s how this world needs you to be, so it can keep spinning.”

Juyeon lets go of Hyunjoon’s hand, leaving it hanging off the edge of the bed. “None of this makes sense. It’s impossible.”

One day feels like talking to a wall and waiting for it to answer back. Three days pass, and his throat feels strange from disuse, because no one else can get words out of him like Juyeon can, and his heart feels sore from all the things he’s been holding inside, with no place to let them out; thoughts, ideas, apologies, memories that have finally come back to him, bits and pieces of his entire lifetime predating Juyeon. Two weeks without talking to Juyeon comes the breaking point, wherein he feels like his vision is hazy and his fingertips are going numb.

“All this, but you’re still too stubborn to back down,” Jaehyun laughs, out of disbelief rather than amusement. They’re sitting under the purple bougainvillea canopy in the garden beside his house, Hyunjoon picking flowers and twisting them to shreds.

“It’s not a matter of backing down. It’s a matter of making him come around to accepting the truth.”

“You really think this world was fabricated when you fell out of the sky?”

“I think it spawned as a mistake. I prayed for a place where I would be safe, and it manifested out of thin air, borrowing materials from two opposite ends of a timeline to create… this.”

“This world caught in-between. But what happens when you leave, then?” Hyunjoon turns sharply at that, at the assumption that he’ll be leaving, that he’ll find his way home, that he’ll choose to stay there and never return. “Do we all crumble and fade out of existence?”

He looks at the papery petals in his hands. He opens his palms and lets them fly away in the wind. “It will all fade if I leave,” Hyunjoon responds. He’s not sure how he knows this for certain, but the words feel comforting, final, convincing. He’s not even sure how this world’s very existence became tied to his own presence within it, how it crumbles without him. This is why magic is dangerous, he supposes; tangling himself in the cobwebs, strings, and timelines of the worlds is the price he pays for summoning such a desperate wish that night. “You’ll go to one side or another; either you find yourself in the ancient world, my world, or you find yourself somewhere in the future.”

But what if it simply pauses when he leaves, everything falling to a standstill, waiting for his return, always waiting a wish and a fortress wall away?

Silence falls. Hyunjoon is working through another bundle of flowers- Jaehyun winces as he shreds them mindlessly, but doesn’t have it in him to stop him. He’s so fixated, so absent, that he doesn’t notice the gate swinging open and closed, admitting someone into the garden, or the shadow cast long and warped across the greenery, or the soft voice that says, “I thought I’d find you here.”

Jaehyun nudges him. Hyunjoon looks up, but fights against himself when his face begins to light up. He crosses his arms and turns away, staring off at the garden through the gaps in the canopy.

Juyeon leans over in an effort to level himself with Hyunjoon, to catch his wild eyes. Jaehyun coughs pointedly, rising from the bench and excusing himself, a guest in his own home. But he’s amused by them, turning back and smiling as he closes the garden gate behind him. “Stop ignoring me,” Juyeon starts, stretching his hand out, palm up. “Come with me… enough of this.”

Hyunjoon is stubborn, but his willpower has worn down thin. It still takes him a few minutes of deliberation, of making Juyeon stand and wait for him to come around. But then he does put his hand in his and rise up, following him out of Jaehyun’s house, around the street-corner and out of sight.

They stop by Juyeon’s parked car, and Hyunjoon wants to cross his arms again, but he doesn’t want to let go of Juyeon’s hand. “Have you changed your mind?”

“I don’t know, I just don’t want this to go on for any longer. It’s so useless.”

Juyeon puts his hand on Hyunjoon’s waist, but Hyunjoon resists his desire to close the distance between them. “Take me to the next city over. Show me the mountains, the oceans, the countries across.”

Juyeon’s voice is still soft and defeated. “It’s hours and hours of driving, we can’t possibly do it today…” But he trails off, because he realizes that that’s Hyunjoon’s point exactly. He’s so convinced that this world is a tangle of lies and impossibilities, an apple with a rotten core, fallen far from the tree but suspended above the ground, that he’s sure nothing exists beyond this city.

Hyunjoon opens the car door gingerly, and takes the passenger’s seat like someone who’s never gotten into a car before (in truth, he hasn’t). Juyeon puts the key in the ignition but hesitates before turning it. “Are you sure about this?”

His knuckles are white, wrapped around the seat-belt stretched taut across his chest, but he nods anyway.

Juyeon drives slow, casting glances at Hyunjoon every few seconds, as though worried he’ll get car-sick or try to claw his way out. Hyunjoon is calm, for the most part, and after a few minutes of adjustment, he even tells Juyeon to speed up.

All the streets Hyunjoon has only seen on foot whir past the window, dizzying him. They pass by their school on the crest of the hill overlooking the city, the front gates shut, looking foreboding and abandoned. Everything is upside-down. The wind changes directions, the sun sets too fast in the wrong place in the sky.

They leave the city limits behind them, the buildings spreading apart, thinning, and disappearing completely. The road flattens and widens, and up ahead of them, all Hyunjoon can see are fields on either side. In the distance, there are mountains, but the mountains don’t come closer, the farther out they drive.

Night birds begin to sing. Frogs ribbit and dance across the lily-pads floating on the glassy surface of the ponds stretching between worlds. But it all comes and goes with the blink of an eye, and soon there’s nothing but the road ahead of them.

The mountains disappear, the fields fall out of sight. Fog comes in, thick as pea soup. It surrounds them, so heavy that even the brightest headlights can’t pierce through it. “I’ve never driven in such bad fog before,” Juyeon comments, narrowing his eyes to try to see farther ahead.

“Do you want to turn around?” Hyunjoon asks quietly.

Juyeon wants to, but he keeps driving onwards anyway, until they’re surrounded by cold, pluming grey. They can’t see ahead, they can’t see behind them. The world has narrowed down to nothing but the car they’re in. They’re driving in an endless loop, in a circle without feeling themselves go upside-down.

He doesn’t know how much time passes deep in the fog, minutes or hours or days, before it begins to thin again. When it clears, they find themselves back where they’d started, on the same street corner, as though nothing had moved at all, as though the drive was nothing but a daydream.

Juyeon sits at the foot of Hyunjoon’s bed, hands tucked underneath his legs, lip bitten raw. Hyunjoon is gently fastening the ribbons of the clothes he came in, still stained with blood and burst at the seams, straightening the gauzy black headpiece and placing it over smoothed hair.

_I don’t want you to go_ , Juyeon’s eyes seem to say, whenever Hyunjoon meets them. So they settle on stolen breaths, stolen glances, pretending Hyunjoon isn’t about to try to return to his world the same way he arrived here. Hyunjoon doesn’t know what he’s expecting to find, what he’s expecting to return to, when this world has been so welcoming and kind; but he can’t leave the door closed, not without trying, now that he’s finally remembered.

“The fortress wall I fell against back then, at the end of the chase… it opened and let me through,” Hyunjoon had been thinking out loud earlier, a finger pressed to his lips, deep in his own mind.

“Through sheer will? Magic? The deities above answering your prayers?” Juyeon questioned. It all seemed so impossible, even after his eyes had been opened to this endlessly looping, claustrophobically small world. But he’s standing on the edge of a fine line drawn between abyss and oblivion, where neither option seems better; denying any of this is futile, but believing in magic, in his world being a lie coming undone, in the boy he’s in love with being from a kingdom far out of reach, his lifetime so ancient that he belongs fragmented and wrapped in silk, buried beneath the earth? Juyeon’s head spins.

Hyunjoon had sifted his fingers through the fabric of his clothes, maybe seeking comfort in the soft material, maybe searching for answers hidden in their folds. “The blood, maybe? Blood is thicker than anything else.” Some say magic runs in the blood of the strong, some say blood is the very core of magic itself. “My hands were bloodied, and I pressed them against the wall as I…”

He’d trailed off, but there was a distant light in his eyes, and soon, wordlessly, he shrugged off his sweatshirt and began fastening the ribbons of his coronation robes.

Now he stood fully dressed, his face beneath the crown cold as the moon. He found a pair of scissors first (Juyeon stepped in front of him and pried them out of his hands), and settled on a needle to the fingertip instead, a pinprick of crimson welling up and spilling over. Hyunjoon didn’t even wince.

“You’re leaving without saying goodbye?” Juyeon had hoped his voice would hold steady, but it broke together with his heart.

Hyunjoon closes his eyes, muttering beneath his breath, hand pressed against the wall, and Juyeon was so sure he’d be gone in the blink of an eye that he almost turned away, but Hyunjoon caught his hand before he could, and pulled him forward, holding him tight as the room closed in around them and gave way for an entirely different place.

Hyunjoon is terrified of Juyeon fading to dust when he tries to take him back to a kingdom that occurred a thousand lifetimes before his own, but his selfish desire to have comfort and company resulted in him taking his hand last-minute.

The first thing that greets them is the noise and the colour, the mid-day sun high and blinding after coming from a dark bedroom. As far as the eye can see are tents, structures, and fortresses decorated in flags and royal seals, and throngs of people milling between.

Not ten minutes have passed here since Hyunjoon left, even though he spent close to a year in Juyeon’s world. Time paused to accommodate his absence, and it returns to its usual winding and ticking now.

Royal guards pass, parting the crowds as they split up and search frantically for the missing prince before word spreads that he’s disappeared from the palace.

Juyeon is in deep, dizzy disbelief, holding onto Hyunjoon, as though he’ll be lost forever if he lets go; and maybe he will, maybe it’s a good thing he holds him so tight. He doesn’t know anything about this world, and he doesn’t know if the world they came from is still there to go back to; what if it all came undone, as quickly as it came together, as soon as he and Hyunjoon stepped out of it?

Hyunjoon hesitates when the royal guards elbow past him. Juyeon lets go of him, even if everything inside of him is aching in protest, refusal, fear. If Hyunjoon turns himself in, finds his way home, then Juyeon supposes…

“What am I doing? What are you doing, letting me go?” Hyunjoon looks down at Juyeon’s empty hands, accusatory, almost upset. He unravels the headpiece, starting from the ribbon in a bow under his chin, and throws it into the mud tracked with horse-hooves and carriage wheels. “Hide me,” he simply says, crashing into Juyeon’s arms and burying his face into his chest until the fleet of guards pass.

“Change of heart?” Juyeon mumbles breathlessly, the wind knocked out of him.

“I never said I was staying. All I said was I wanted to go back.”

And now they’re here, but it doesn’t feel like Hyunjoon’s heart resides here anymore. All this time, he was holding onto something he thought he missed dearly, he thought he’d lost forever, but now that he has it within reach again, it doesn’t feel like home anymore.

Home is the boy he’s found a safe haven in the arms of. His home is wherever Juyeon is, whether his world is gone or whether it still awaits them on the other side of a bloodied fortress wall. Whether it’s rotten at its core, looping yet confined, stagnant yet overwhelming. And if it has indeed collapsed into itself, and they have nowhere to go back to, then maybe, just maybe, this time they’ll fall through the wall and stumble into somewhere new.

Now it’s Juyeon’s turn to be terrified of Hyunjoon being bound to this world when they try to go back, of Hyunjoon fading to dust if they fall into a place a thousand lifetimes beyond his. He closes his eyes and finds Hyunjoon’s lips, and maybe, this time, instead of Hyunjoon’s, his desperate wish will be enough to take them back.

Seasons have passed since they stepped out of Juyeon’s world that night, the small world caught between, and spring flowers have bloomed and died in their pavilion by the forest. Apple trees have risen and grown tall in their wake. It mourns the absence of the two boys it used to behold, wondering where they went, and why it’s taking them so long to return.

**Author's Note:**

> TWO THINGS:  
> WATER IS ACTUALLY A RATHER POOR CONDUCTOR OF ELECTRICITY, BUT I NEEDED IT FOR THE PLOT. DO NOT LET THIS FIC MISINFORM YOU. I REPEAT, WATER IS A POOR CONDUCTOR OF ELECTRICITY  
> the second thing is the part where i said hyunjoon "would rather eat with his fingers than a fork" isnt implying that people in ancient korea ate with their fingers im aware of the utensils they used (metal/silver spoons and chopsticks btw) i just thought it would be cute to make him stubbornly anti-forks because theyre unfamiliar and foreign to him. i know its not that deep but i had to clarify... also: hyunjoon was kidnapped by adversaries because having a prince as a prisoner of war with a bounty on his head is a common way of blackmailing/pressuring kingdoms into doing what the invader/adversarial power wants. but i'm not sure who the adversaries would be because i'm not sure if he's from the three kingdoms or the joseon era at this point. this is all so stupid because i've butchered history and you the reader probably don't even care. you clicked on this for juhwall and got a fucking magical disaster research essay. anyway BOTTOM LINE dont take anything in this fic seriously or factually please
> 
> THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING IT THOUGH... if you enjoyed it even somewhat, Please give me feedback! talk to me about it! comment here, or talk to me on my [twitter](https://www.twitter.com/hwalljelly) or my [curiouscat](https://www.curiouscat.me/39z)! and i'm always looking for deobi friends, especially fellow writers <3


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